About the Work
This is what it looked like, the happily anarchic exhaustion of the Woodstock generation after they had fallen fast asleep. In 1975, after a pop festival in the Luberon, Will McBride focused his attention on the stragglers of the '68 protest movement in their paradisiacal mood. The house photographer of the youth cult magazine 'Twen' had distanced himself from the squatting actions, preferring instead to photograph quirky opposition attitudes in New York traffic: a man, for example, pushing back against the radiator bonnet with his head. Almost forty years before Vanessa Beecroft tucked cold naked beauties between Louis Vuitton's luxury suitcases, McBride filled a stack of cartons in Munich with the unclothed ensemble of the hippie musical 'Hair': sixteen actors extending their hands and feet out of the cardboard boxes to reach the others - all staying in touch, no one isolated. McBride still strolls around Berlin with his camera, but only to collect impressions which he then transforms into painting. As a GI who stayed on in Germany, he began photographing Berlin streets and their passers-by in 1956. He recorded isolated everyday situations in places where there was still no Berlin Wall but where there soon would be one. By comparison, the hippies in the cardboard boxes look like an allegory of the freedom which the young people have taken for themselves.
